Remember the yellow sweaters and seersucker shorts? We finally used them!We’ve spent the past month traveling (some of) the US…from Texas to LA, San Francisco, Toronto, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and back to the west coast. We missed a bunch of states in the middle and popped into Canada for 16 hours but we enjoyed the ones we saw and the people we hung out with. And I’ll admit, we’re ready to back in our cozy TX beds.

Our last hurrah of the trip was a 4-day stay at a beach house in Oxnard (just north of Malibu, south of Santa Barbara). It was a blast! I’ll share photos in another post. But here’s a preview. We took photos of the grandkids at the beach, just as Grandma had hoped for.

Wrangling 7 kids under the age of 7 wasn’t going to be easy but for the most part it turned out okay and when I spotted these bar stools in the beach house, I knew we had to use them. Grandpa set them up on then sand.And we plopped those kiddos on top. This photo is so telling of the kids’ personalities…Lucy with her legs crossed, Harrison yelling off to the side, Jilly sitting so proper and poised. I love seeing the cousins all together.We took single shots and group shots and let the kids act silly together.Oh that smile.Casey ran around and roughed them up after the serious shots.

And things weren’t all smooth. We had a few tears. Crawling into shots.Kids going sideways.And I hoped to get more photos like this:But 1 second later Lucy had a melt down, worried that her dress would get wet down by the water.And she wasn’t wrong about that.Harrison kerplunked right down in the ocean.That’s a wrap.And in case you’re wondering how many adults it takes to get 7 kids to sort of smile (btw, I took 20 shots of this pose and this is the only one that turned out, since Owen had his mouth open in all the others).Well, it looks something like this. I’m so glad Grandpa thought to snap it.Hooray for digital cameras!